In recent weeks, one Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement (DTAA) every week (the last being with Mozambique), has been our average. However, our handling of the Vodafone tax case has left much to be desired. The government of India has been entering into DTAAs with various countries to provide for reduced rates of tax on dividend, interest, royalties, technical service fees etc received
In recent years the increasing influence of the media has changed the shape of politics all over the globe. Consequently, it has raised provocative questions about journalism’s role in the political process. There are questions about media’s effect on the political system and the subsystems – the legislature, the executive and the lobbies. Is media power in politics a
The draft Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2011 hosted by the National Advisory Council (NAC) on its website for public scrutiny, apparently rewrites some key principles of the Constitution of India, Indian Penal Code, Code of Criminal Procedure 1973 and Indian public services. It is the downside of allowing social activism to overshadow the
Anna Hazare`s protest for the Jan Lokpal Bill has an unlikely twin - the Tea Party movement in the US. And we are not talking of how both embody citizens` voices against the government. The conditions of their births vary greatly - Tea Party started in 2008 in the wake of the financial crisis while Hazare`s protest started in 2011, when the UPA government ignored the Lokpal Bill,
No self-respecting democracy or government would have allowed her greatest painter to die in exile. India did. Our leaders, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, have promptly described his demise as a "national loss". That’s a crazy and hypocritical thing to say after you did nothing to assure a man his fundamental right to life and personal liberty. I hope t
Could India have saved the embarrassment before the international community because of the so-called oversight in the list of 50 most wanted fugitives residing in Pakistan? The list of most wanted terrorists was handed to Pakistan government in May this year. However, it later emerged that two alleged fugitives out of the list were in India. One of the listed terrorists, Wazhul Kumar Kh
Phula, Shyama, Madhu, Rani ki mummy, Chintu ki mummy and other women of Motilal camp, a sprawling slum near Munirka were all there. Having wrapped up their daily chores which included sending their kids off to school, and cooking breakfast for their husbands, they had gathered at a community centre run by Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS), an NGO working in the field of right to informatio
Among the more disturbing aspects of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Obama Moment and its aftermath is our utter collective callousness towards the thousands of peaceful protesters who were beaten and driven out of Ramlila Maidan in the dead of night. Both the government and the Congress party that leads it are brazening out the decision to swoop on sleeping satyagrahis, rain lath
In politics, consistency has never been a great virtue. If Uma Bharti’s re-induction in the BJP is any indication, the party is all set to launch her as the face of its campaign in Uttar Pradesh polls, ignoring the fact that she has rubbed the party the wrong way in every conceivable manner. When BJP president Nitin Gadkari shared the dais with the mercurial sadhvi, he must have bee
Haves and have-nots (and Jantar Mantar) How it all boils down to inclusion Close to two decades of liberalisation has not only enriched the middle class but also expanded it. A range of business and services – IT and telecom, for example – has created jobs for millions and the families that were loosely speaking lower middle class in 1991 are now middle middle
The government has finally made a new directorate for criminal investigation - income tax (DCI) to take forward the five-fold strategy to tackle black money. Earlier, in February 2010, on signing the first Tax Information Exchange Agreement (TIEA) with Bermuda, our finance minister informed the visiting steering group of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that
There has been a debate recently about the quality of research and its impact. I will not deny that there is a huge need for quality improvement in research and its theoretical, applied and other social and policy impacts. But how to trigger processes which breed impatience in the mind of scholars about the problems which our society is facing and which, for some reason, we have learned to live
A nation of over one billion people and not a hangman to slip the noose over death row’s Mahendra Nath Das, who has exhausted all his pleas and can only wait for the lumbering bureaucracy to find a trained hangman who can do the knot properly and according to custom. This is no easy task and with executions becoming rarer the family business has died out with sons no longer ready
Bhatta-Parsaul villages in Greater Noida may have become the new symbol of disquiet over land acquisition but they represent a larger, worldwide challenge to policymakers. Large-scale acquisition of farmland in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia and Southeast Asia has made headlines over the past one year. Africa has become a prime target for land grabbers from the corporate sector, with money
There is a clear pattern in the way a section of our "intellectuals" has reacted to the recent people’s movements against corruption – the Anna Hazare campaign on Lokpal and now Baba Ramdev’s agitation against black money. This section has bluntly brushed aside both the movements. The point is not whether such movements will be able to achieve what they set o
Twenty-nine students, studying between class III and class VIII, were asked to leave school. Not because of bad behaviour, poor attendance or having failed a class but because they were infected with HIV. This is what happened in a government school in Kancheepuram district of Tamil Nadu, where the headmaster barred these children from attending regular classes because of the fear that the othe
The prime minister has promised to resurrect land acquisition reforms. But the bill in the works is quite a shoddy piece of legislation. It doesn’t even have the decency to say, “I’ll take your land, but I’ll make you
The question that struck me after seeing the India census 2011 report is: Is the Pre-natal Diagnostic Technique (Prohibition of Sex Selection) (PCPNDT) Act a toothless piece of legislation? That seems to be the case as the sex ratio has turned from bad to worse. While the normal ratio for children between 0 and 6 is about 950 girls to 1000 boys, the 2011 census shows that the number of girls ha
Stakeholders including small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and professional services firms are now worse off with a half-hearted approach of the government allowing foreign direct investment (FDI) in limited liability partnerships (LLPs) in a piecemeal measure, while also withdrawing the advantages enshrined in the LLP Act, 2009. This has raised more questions than answers about the fate
What is world class? About two decades ago when the Canadian government wanted to modernise itself and its public services, it appointed a group of consultants to go around the world and find out what constitutes the quality of world-class organisations. This team came out with the following qualities of world-class organisations which they preferred to call as “adaptive organisations&rdq
